Keithley 2783 SI Trends free download

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A G R E AT E R M E A S U R E O F C O N F I D E N C E The Role of Nanotechnology in the Semiconductor Industry Linda Rae, Keithley Instruments, Inc. T he nanotechnology industry is In addition, consumer products are be- is quickly hitting a brick wall with current currently one of the most active coming more feature rich, with consumers methods. This is one area where we're seeing and promising fields of technol- unwilling to pay substantially more for these significant research investment, for example, ogy. While there's been discussion features. The challenge to device designers is with transistors on carbon nanotubes, new of nanotech applied to everything to put more features into the same or smaller crossbar architectures, and nanowires, to from clothing to golf balls, the main area of devices without significantly increasing name only a few. research funding and investment is clearly costs. In order to get more functionality, de- There are also many difficulties in test- centered in materials research applied to vices must shrink even further. Nanotech- ing at the nanoscale level. For instance, it is semiconductor technology. nology breakthroughs promise to help our incredibly complex to probe down to the de- One of the biggest challenges for nano- industry break out of the basic physics barri- vice level for failure analysis and other test- technology today is fabrication. The cost to ers we're facing with miniaturization, along ing. This requires new testing equipment, build a new semiconductor fab reaches eas- with addressing the heat problems associated probers, and new nanotech measurement ily into the billions of dollars. This has led with device shrinkage. standards, such as the IEEE standards just many within the nanotechnology industry As devices shrink, pushing Moore's Law adopted for carbon nanotube testing. Typical to investigate what can be done with already to its limits, the semiconductor industry has semiconductor probing systems today will existing semiconductor technology. After had to be creative with pushing the size en- require major overhauls to be able to probe all, advanced semiconductor processing is velope. Now, feature sizes of some devices future generations of nanotech-driven elec- already taking place well below 100nm, the are as small as a few atoms thick with line tronic products. threshold for nanotechnology. thicknesses of just one atom. Manufacturing The Role of Nanotechnology in the Semiconductor Industry